Skin

65

Prosecution lawyers sometimes talked to Caffery about the ‘CSI effect’ – the way the American TV programme made people, specifically juries, believe forensic science was omnipotent. That there was a test for everything. That if the clue was there the crime-scene officers would automatically find it. The truth, as every law-keeper knew, was that the best forensic scientist was only as good as the investigating officer. All forensic science was intelligence-led, so it was exquisitely easy to manipulate.

Gerber was dead. In the few moments Caffery had been outside, his heart had pumped out the last of its sticky heat and was now motionless and grey, sunk in on itself. Which gave Caffery a chance to change the course of history. He limped around the house recovering his belongings: his phone, his quick-cuffs and pepper spray. Then he spent forty minutes orchestrating the scene: wiping prints, scrubbing at bloodstains, positioning Gerber’s body, so that when the teams arrived he would treat the place as if he was the investigating officer, not the victim, taking the CSI people around and selling them his own very feasible version of events.

The scenario: Gerber had known the net was tightening. He’d dumped Caffery in the cesspit, thinking he was dead, and had ended his own life with the illegal gun he’d kept wrapped in a tea towel in his desk. When Caffery had regained consciousness, he’d found enough of a signal at the top of the ladder in the cesspit to fire off a text to Turnbull. There was no mention of a gun in the text, Caffery didn’t know anything about a gun, he said he’d heard nothing down in the cesspit. It was all a terrible surprise when the teams arrived and released him to see what Gerber had done to himself.

He watched them take Gerber’s body away. When his fingers were tested there’d be gunpowder residue on them. There’d be a stray bullet found in the ceiling of the corridor that must have been fired off reflexively by Gerber after the initial suicide bullet. The only fingerprints on the 45 Hardballer and on the rounds still in it would be Gerber’s. Otherwise it would be clean. The only fibres they’d find on it would come from a tea towel they’d recover from a drawer in his office where he must have been storing it for years. There’d be none of Caffery’s blood or footsteps or fingerprints anywhere above the ground floor, only what he’d left in the break-in – a misdemeanour he’d put his hands up to straight away. There’d be no mention of Amos Chipeta.

Caffery stayed long enough to see the ballistics officers recover the Hardballer from the floor of the corridor. Seven hundred nicker down the drain. Shame. It was an effective gun: ugly, but effective. Given time, it might even find its way back out on to the street. Then he’d have to buy it all over again. Outside he stopped for a moment in the evening sun and looked back at the place, at the manhole cover and the swimming-pool. He thought about Tanzania. What it would be like to grow up deformed and in poverty. What England would look like through Chipeta’s eyes.

Two paramedics stood in the front doorway watching him. They’d been trailing him around the place all afternoon, patiently trying to coax him into the ambulance. Now he gave them a friendly smile and, before they could stop him, got into the Mondeo, lifted the bad leg into the driver’s footwell and started the car. The hospital was twenty miles away. He didn’t need an ambulance. He gave the paramedics a small wave as he pulled out of the driveway. If he could survive what he’d survived today he figured he could manage twenty miles on his own.